On Thu, Oct 20, 2005 at 11:58:21PM +0200, Christoph Badura wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 05:11:38PM -0500, James Chacon wrote:
> > Not necessarily stripping them off in the path lookup routines, but when
> > it prints back out the results.
> > 
> > i.e. find /etc/
> > /etc/motd
> > Looks a whole lot better than
> > /etc//motd
> 
> So, what if I used, say,  "/etc//" on purpose so that the output is easier
> to process with a program?
> 
> Having programs second guess the users intentions instead of doing exactly
> what it has been told has a history of not getting it right since the beginning
> of computing science.  So why bother?  One of the reasons I've put up with
> Unix the last 25 years was that it did't try to be "helpful" and instead
> tried to do exactly what it was told -- nothing more, nothing less.
> 
> I find it disturbing that we are changing programs to be "helpful" for
> purely cosmetic reasons.

Isn't a UNIXy way to solve the problem to add a program to the system
that changes paths to "canonical" form, either with or without knowledge
of the filesystem the path belongs to?

% canonpath <<EOF
///usr/sbin//find
././.ssh/../.ssh/known_hosts
EOF
/usr/sbin//find
./.ssh/known_hosts
% 

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung@ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933